John McCain and What Could Have Been

I suppose it'll remain one of life's imponderables how John McCain could have played so successfully on the national stage for nearly 30 years and then, in the coda of his career, been such an amateurish, unqualified flop.

I also suppose a lot of excuse-filled, explanatory books will be sold to the diminishing faithful. Rick Davis will say it was Steve Schmidt's fault, Schmidt will say it was Davis' fault, McCain will say it was both of their faults and the spurned Mike Murphy, with immense personal justification, will say it was everybody's fault but his.

Naturally one of the principal excuses deployed will emanate referentially from the above: the diminishing faithful. Hey, it wasn't really the advisers' or candidate's fault -- their electoral deck was wickedly thinned and stacked and ill fated because of the ill-commanding you-know-who.

Looking back, they'll say, they were doomed before they got started.

That won't be an entirely unreasonable defense. On the other hand, it won't be an entirely defensible defense, either. Because during the campaign there were consciously rejected options that could have, and almost unquestionably would have, helped.

Furthermore those options won't be available for critical ridicule because of some claim of hindsighted vision. No, that Arizona turkey buzzard won't fly, since there were and continue to be so many audibles being screamed from the sidelines. Virtually everyone, it seems, could see the mixed metaphor of the train wreck coming -- and more importantly, the reasons why -- except the campaign's catastrophe-inducing engineers themselves.

Why, for instance, did the honorable John McCain, who in short order had bared few scrupulous teeth about acting the dishonorable demagogue, so wholeheartedly embrace a $700 billion "bailout" that was tailor designed for the most depraved of populist opportunism?

I mean, what did he care, and what, as his running mate so philosophically has put it, did he have to lose? One way or another the bill was going to sail through Congress anyway, so it wasn't as though McCain could have singlehandedly obstructed this most unpleasant but quite necessary (albeit partial) fix. And the blinkered mob would have loved him for it.

The demagogic recipe was as simple as scrambled eggs: just abundantly bray about those universally despised Wall Street fat cats and how the little, common and good people, for so long abused by the aforementioned predators, should not be hanged on such an extravagant hook.

Huey Long could have worked wonders with this babe. Ah, but you say, John McCain is no Huey Long, in that he lacks the man's natural talents for agitating the hopelessly sentimental. Yet that's another turkey of an argument that won't fly. In this case the mob was exceedingly self-agitated, hence McCain merely would have been exploiting -- not creating -- mass outrage.

But the better part, the even easier part, the newer and eventually improved part that could have allowed McCain to both support and oppose the bill, to have had the best of both worlds? Once the full, corpulent and porcine Congress got hold of the legislation, it larded it up with all manner of exquisitely risible goodies. Now, I ask you, what could have been simpler than for McCain to stand, so to speak, at the schoolhouse door and bellow, "No more, not this: a clean bill today, a clean bill tomorrow, indeed, clean bills forever."

In short, he could have popularly opposed the bill not on its inherent unpopularity, but as a sacrifice to his long and noble crusade against the ignominious earmark. But this, he did not do. And why he did not do it will today, tomorrow and forever be an elementary question mark, since, as noted, he had already shown little reluctance to mine the disreputable depths of demagoguery.

Perhaps the discipline of economics was simply so foreign to his chiefly neoconservative mind that he just could not grasp the bill's demagogic appeal. That's one possibility; plain political incompetence is another, and one could rather easily rattle off other plausible explanations. But we'll never know for sure -- the McCain campaign's blockheadedness is that well established as well as largely opaque.

Prior to the bloody obvious potential of the bailout bill, however, was the always obvious strategy -- as smartly hustled by former adviser Mike Murphy, of 2000 fame -- of pandering not just to the base, but broadly: a coherent message calibrated to the likes of the nation's mental midsection of independents; to whatever corps of wayward or disgruntled Democrats that existed (or could be confected); and of course to even unreformed conservatives, who, in the end, would have been willing to temporarily bite the ideological bullet for the sake of victory.

But this, McCain failed to execute as well, even though it was an even greater natural for him than badmouthing the bailout.

The ever-lengthening list of things that McCain did indeed do that he should never have done is of course far too long to capture in merely one column. Nor does its familiarity any longer intrigue. It's too well known. What does intrigue, however, are the expansive possibilities that did exist and which McCain rejected, and which could have made this a much tighter competition.